Tag: Olivier House

It’s Just a Matter of Time

Sunday morning and the last day of Saints & Sinners. It’s been a lot of fun, if tiring. I headed down there yesterday afternoon in a Lyft, hung out in our suite for a bit and practiced for my reading–I read my story “The Ditch” from School of Hard Knox, and I think it went very well. It was a terrific reading session; Rob Byrnes, Jean Redmann, Marco Carocari, David Slayton, David Pederson and one other person whose name I can’t recall off the top of my head; my apologies because I really enjoyed what he read.I then went back up to our suite and came back down for the anthology launch with Paul. Those readings were also fantastic–and I am looking forward to reading the book more than I already was. I am also the judge for next year, so I’ll be reading a lot of stories in the fall. That will suffice as my volunteer work for 2024, so don’t bother to ask; the answer will be no.

I started reading an old Evan Hunter novel yesterday, Last Summer. It was a book I’d always wanted to read when I was younger, and I was reminded of it sometime during the pandemic, so I got a copy of it and its sequel, Come Winter, from eBay and so I started reading it at long last yesterday. I’ve never seen the film, either; but I do remember Barbara Hershey and Richard Thomas (aka John-Boy Walton) starred in it. It also put me in mind of another trope from that era of publishing; books with teenagers as protagonists (and/or antagonists) were almost always set during the summer, and so many were set on coastal islands–this one, Summer of ’42, A Summer Place, etc. It of course makes sense; teenagers had a lot of free time to get into shenanigans during the summer, especially when they were on a vacation somewhere. I’ve actually fallen into that trope a couple of times myself–Dark Tide, Lake Thirteen–and numerous other stories I would like to tell at some point. I do like the idea of gradually getting rid of all this paper around here by digitizing or disposing of things that I’ll never get around to writing. I don’t want to start writing fast in a frenzied attempt to write everything I want to before I die–and there’s always new ideas, too. But i know I’d really like to eventually get back to that novel where I based the victim on Ann Coulter…hmmm, maybe that could be the next Scotty. That’s actually a very good idea. Hmmmm.

It’s so nice to be around writers. It really is a balm for my soul. I did write some yesterday morning, but I am not going to even try today. I am very tired–I’ve done a lot of walking this weekend–and of course having to be “on” is tiring. The truth is I am not at 100% yet, much as I want to believe that I am, and there’s nothing wrong with that. One exciting development of the weekend is that I experienced no stress, anxiety or stage fright for my reading yesterday. Not only was I calm and not sweating buckets, I was actually able to relax and enjoy the experience. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before? It was wild. I’ve actually been relaxed the entire weekend; I don’t believe I understood before how much my anxiety impacted me at events like this. Having a calm and quiet head is a lovely thing, and now that the creativity has come back, I might actually start enjoying my life again.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time reminiscing about past S&S weekends, too; remembering how it all started, how much of it was done on a fraying shoestring because there was no money for it, and held in donated spaces at gay bars. It also used to be in May, so the weather was a LOT hotter. Paul and I used to always get the pool suite at the Olivier House for our home base, and people always used to wind up in our room later in the evening to drink and socialize and have a lot of fun. I couldn’t do that now–as it is, i stayed up past my usual bedtime Friday night and paid for it all day yesterday (legs are tired today, too). I also came up with a title for my memoir should I ever try to write one: Unreliable Narrator.

And LSU won the SEC women’s gymnastics championships last night in very dominant style. They weren’t as on as they usually are, and still set an incredibly high score and really have the potential to win the national title this year, too. And the US had a great outcome at the World Figure Skating Championships, winning two golds (men’s and ice dance) and a silver (women’s).

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader, and I’ll most likely see you tomorrow.

Homage

Gore Vidal was one of three rather important gay male writers who emerged from the wreckage of World War II (the others being Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote), and I have always enjoyed reading his work–even if it’s not page turning material; I like the way he writes and I like the way he tells his stories.

He wrote six or seven major works of fiction based in American history that tell, in their own way, a more clear-eyed vision of what American history was and how the nation developed; called the Narratives of Empire, they certainly weren’t published in order but rather, I gather, in the order that struck his fancy; he was also busy writing other things and feuding with other writers–notably Capote, Norman Mailer, and William F. Buckley–and he obviously had a flair for the outrageous and controversial; The City and the Pillar, a very frank and daring and sympathetic look at the experiences of one young man navigating the world as a gay man, made him so controversial he was unpublishable for a number of years; he spent the time writing mysteries under the name Edgar Box and writing screenplays. Myra Breckinridge, which undoubtedly does not hold up to modern scrutiny and eyes; the book was clearly intended as satire, examining societal gender constructs and views on sexuality as well as the role of women. I read it for the first time maybe ten years ago, and it struck me as quaint; an artifact of a time certainly less enlightened, but trying to head for the light. (It may be worth a reread.) He also wrote Julian the Apostate, which I greatly enjoyed and read one year beside the pool during Saints & Sinners, back when it was in May and we used to always spend the weekend at the Olivier House on Toulouse Street.

But the Narratives of Empire began with, I think, Washington DC, followed by 1876 and later Burr; he also wrote about the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and the growth of the American empire in Empire, which I have also read and greatly enjoyed. I’ve not read all the titles yet; but reading Lincoln next after Empire made the most sense to me as some of the real-life characters depicted in that book are also in Lincoln, and it’s been a very long time since I read anything about Lincoln.

Elihu B. Washburne opened his gold watch. The spidery hands shows five minutes to six.

“Wait here,” he said to the driver, who said, “How do I know you’re coming back, sir?”

At the best of times Congressman Washburne’s temper was a most unstable affair, and his sudden outbursts of rage–he could roar like a preacher anticipating hell–were much admired in his adopted state of Illinois, where constituents proudly claimed that he was the only militant teetotaller who behaved exactly like a normal person at five minutes to six, say, in the early morning of an icy winter day–of the twenty-third of February, 1861, to be exact.

“Why, you black—!” As the cry in Washburne’s throat began to go to its terrible maximum, caution, the politican’s ever-present angel, cut short the statesman’s breath. A puff of unresonated cold steam filled the space between the congressman and the Negro driver on his high seat.

Heart beating rapidly with unslaked fury, Washburne gave the driver some coins. “You are to stay here until I return, you hear me?”

Growing up with Southern parents and the so-called “Southern heritage”, Lincoln’s place in history was, to say the least, still resented. The lionization of Lincoln after his death was, in some part, made possible by his murder; there’s not telling what the judgment of history would be on him had he lived to serve out his second term. Would we revile Lincoln for the reconstruction policies he would have followed? How different would the face of our present day nation be had he lived? An enormous mythology has sprung up around Lincoln since his death; “Honest Abe the rail-splitter” is a tale told to school children to this day, or how a young girl told him to grow a beard, and so on and so forth. The Civil War has been analyzed and written about endlessly; no one person could ever hope to read and digest all the documentation that exists of the conflict, let alone all the books published centering the war. I was always interested in Lincoln–even as a child I couldn’t wrap my mind around the mentality that people claiming to be “patriotic Americans” reviled Lincoln and glorified the Confederacy; I still am unable to consider such without triggering a massive amount of cognitive dissonance in my brain–and read lots of children’s books about him, but by the time I was an adult I was no longer interested in reading further biographies of the man. I am relatively uninterested in the possibility that he may have had relationships with men; without definitive proof that will always be a theory, and let’s face it, there is more evidence (although nothing conclusive) about his predecessor James Buchanan’s sexuality than there ever will be about Lincoln’s–hence my story “The Dreadful Scott Decision” I wrote for The Faking of the President.

Lincoln’s task was to preserve the Union in the face of its collapse, and that is what he strove to do. Was secession constitutional? Lincoln didn’t think so; the Constitution did not provide for the dissolution of the Union but at the same time it stated that any rights or restrictions not granted to the federal government in the document thereby fell to the individual states. So, does that mean the states held the right to leave the union? Andrew Jackson certainly didn’t think so, since he threatened to send federal troops into South Carolina during the nullification crisis. Part of the reason I actually wanted to read this book at this time was because of the stark reminder that Lincoln’s presidency, and the Civil War, serve as proof that mollifying white supremacy and continually compromising with an angry volatile minority, never ends well. (We are seeing it again now with the old Confederate states allied with their rural midwestern states…and of course as always, the ones threatening insurrection or secession claim to be “true patriots.”

Whatever, Mary.

Lincoln serves to humanize the man, and is also equally frank about Lincoln’s own white supremacist beliefs. Is Vidal’s assertion that Lincoln wanted to take the freed slaves and colonize them into Central America or somewhere back in Africa while reimbursing the slave owners for the loss of “property” accurate? It’s not the first time I’ve heard this (never heard it in school, though) and it seems likely to me. I also liked how Vidal got the panic of what it was like to live in Washington during there war so spot on; we never think about that, or how Maryland was a slave state surrounding the district, or that slavery existed and was legal in the district itself; slaves built the White House and the Capital. We never see into Lincoln’s head or from his point of view in this book–a masterful trick of Vidal’s, who thus leaves Lincoln a mystery to the reader.

It’s a compelling narrative, and it also shows us the point of view throughout of one of the conspirators who were hanged for plotting to kill him–David Suratt–and this jumping around from points of view–either of those who admired Lincoln, hated him, or thought him incompetent–gives a more three-dimensional view of the man we have deified for the last 156 years. He was definitely smart, a master politician, and, as Vidal says in the closing paragraphs of the book–if Washington was the father of our country, Lincoln was the father of our modern country.

Highly recommended.